On July 29, Michaela Keyserlingk received a cease-and-desist email from Conservative Party Executive Director Dan Hilton.

The email concerned an ad banner that Ms. Keyserlingk had been using to promote www.canadianasbestosexports.ca, her anti-asbestos website. “Canada is the only western country that still exports deadly asbestos!” reads the banner’s text, which is nestled in between a “Danger” symbol and the Conservative logo.

“It has come to our attention that your organization is currently using a trademark of the Conservative Party of Canada in your advertising material,” wrote Mr. Hilton. “This usage is unauthorized and must cease immediately … Please govern yourself accordingly.”

“I am delighted that someone in the Conservative Party of Canada is finally reacting after years of work by chrysotile asbestos victims,” wrote Ms. Keyserlingk in a reply. “[Hopefully] we could come to some agreement before the ads get replicated too often.”

In 2007, Ms. Keyserlingk’s husband, Robert, was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a cancer that attacks the internal walls of the lungs. As a non-smoker and marathon runner, Mr. Keyserlingk doctors soon traced the illness to a string of summers he had spent as a naval cadet. Living on a ship in close-quarters with asbestos-insulated pipes, Mr. Keyserlingk had inhaled enough of the fibers to lay the seeds of an asbestos-linked disease 40 years later. He died of the disease in December, 2009.

Her husband was a “true blue” Conservative, she says. Mr. Keyserlingk served as the president of the Ottawa Centre Progressive Conservative riding association and spent many an election door-knocking for candidates in the city’s suburbs.

“What killed him is what they are now advertising,” she said.

In 2010, soon after her husband’s death Ms. Keyserlingk received a hand-written note from then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff promising that his party would no longer support the chrysotile industry. The next day, she found out that the Liberal Party had backed a motion to continue providing government funding to the Chrysotile Institute, an asbestos advocacy group.

As claimed by Ms. Keyserlingk’s banner, Canada is the only country in the G8 that continues to produce asbestos – although the mineral is virtually banned for domestic use.

In late June, Canadian delegates successfully blocked the mineral from being added to a UN-sponsored list of hazardous chemicals. At the same time, Prime Minister Stephen Harper traveled to Thetford Mines, Quebec, site of Canada’s only asbestos mine.

Former Transport Minister Chuck Strahl has blamed asbestos exposure for his lung cancer, for which he had to resign earlier this year. The Canadian parliament buildings are currently undergoing an $850 million renovation that, among other things, will strip the buildings of asbestos.